26 comments:

Sweet. I wonder if that's actual color or post-production shading to look more pleasing to the science geek eye. Either way, very cool.

I saw something on SCI where they were trying to generate magnetic fields in excess of 1 million times standard gravity. They put a frog in it and the field was strong enough to lift the frog simply through the trace amounts of iron in the blood. What would that feel like? (it didn't "hurt" the frog, as far as they could tell).

@ScottM:I think the frog was levitated not by the iron in the blood, but by the fact that water is dia-magnetic. Since the frog's body is mostly water (like us) the extremely strong magnetic field is able to overcome gravity and lift the water in the frog's body.

I am a grad student at an institute where some of this magnetic levitation work has taken place. Diamagnetic materials (which is a property that many things have, including water) are repelled from regions with high magnetic field. In the levitation experiments, the researchers use a suitable arrangement of very strong magnets such that there is a region in space that is surrounded by areas with much higher fields. This is referred to as a magnetic trap, and diamagnetic chunks of stuff (i.e. a frog) will experience forces that will keep them in the trap. Water is a diamagnetic substance, which is why this technique can be used to levitate frogs, among other wet things.

The magnetic fields required, as you pointed out, are quite large. This pretty much relegates this technique to the laboratory.

I believe the frogs in the experiments lived long and happy lives after the experiment.

In the Xmen movies there was that fellow who could suck the iron out of peoples blood. That is not what was happening to these frogs, who, I must stress, were treated very well.

I hope these guys have a sex life at some point. That they can do stuff like this is very impressive, but there is more to life than photographic effects created by placing a small drop of ferrofluid within a magnetic field created by a neodymium iron-boron rare-earth magnet.

I put my faith﻿ in the people, but the people let me down. So I turn the other way and I carry on, anyhow. Laid my hand on a dollar bill, but the dollar bill blew away. But the sun is shining down on me and it's here to stay.